How the Iraq War United Radical Islam

With the latest world events--fighting in Fallujah, gun battles in southern Thailand, and an attack on the diplomatic quarter of Damascus--attention is turning even more intently to radical Islam. In March, after the Madrid train bombings, Beliefnet talked with Michael Sells, a renowned comparative religions scholar whose specialty is Saudi Salafism, also known as Wahhabism, about the state of play in global Islam and terrorism. We are reprinting it today because his comments are, if anything, more accurate now than they were a few weeks ago.

What does this mean for the landscape of worldwide Islam?

If it's true that this was an Islamic radical group with ties to Al Qaeda, then it seems to be another act of an organized anti-Western group that has shifted now from the jihad of the Taliban centered around Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to an international war against what is viewed as Western occupation.

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Are you saying that terrorism is decoupling from Islam?

No--I think the ideologies under which these groups operate are grounded in one particular radical version of Islam.

, sometimes called Wahhabism. These -ism terms are always difficult because there are a lot of people who follow the teachings of Ibn Wahhab or Saudi Sunnism without being attached to any terrorist groups or sympathizing with them.

But there are some of those teachings that have helped galvanize these groups and have helped form their ideology. Other teachings come from the Egyptian Islamic brotherhood. And these writings have been combined with some of the Saudi Salafi militant writings to form a view that only this one version of Islam is the correct version of Islam. All other versions of Islam are heretical and should be fought, and Christianity and Judaism are inherently threatening, and Muslims should have as little contact with them as possible, and a jihad in a military sense should be carried out against any group that is threatening the purity of this form of Islam.